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Nexstar Broadcasting Enters Online For Real

If you look at your local TV station’s web site, chances are it sucks. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen a local TV station have a good web site. It’s kind of a shame also as they have lots of video and resources to put together good content for a local market. Most people go to local television web sites for one thing, weather. While the local market online gets more and more heated with Craig’s List and Topix jumping in and of course your local Newspaper’s web site, it makes sense someone in the local television industry finally woke up and realized that with everyone else putting video online, they need to get on the ball. Nexstar Broadcasting seems to understand that their future is not just more and more television but to reach out online as well.

They have started pushing out templates of their local portals to their stations across the nation. Here are a few:WTVWWYOU

They feature weather (current conditions, 7 day forecast and a radar), free classifieds (auto, real estate, other), business directory (with Google Maps), forums, news, web cam, and video. I can’t say I like the layout and how you can position things around, because its not really necessary, and their glossy buttons don’t go with he rest of the site, at least they got the content part right. Their sites are really terrible SEO-wise.

Problem is that most television stations don’t have their own web development staff (maybe the really big stations, but I’m talking about medium/small city America). Local TV web sites have a ways to go before they can really compete online, but it will be interesting to see if this trend spreads to other television companies.